The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 52 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. Chrome 52.0.2743.82 contains a number of fixes and improvements -- a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 52.

Security Fixes and Rewards

Note: Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed.

Unfortunately, Chrome developers have removed the option to disable DirectWrite (both in chrome://flags/#disable-direct-write and --disable-directwrite-for-UI switch). As a result, page and UI fonts began to look blurrier, fuzzy, or the characters are improperly positioned, which is especially noticeable on small sizes. Developers explained this move as phasing out the obsolete technology:https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=579678

However, the new DirectWrite implementation in Chrome gives worse results and eventually the eyes get tired much more quickly. I rolled back to Chrome 51 until the moment when DirectWrite will be comparable by quality with old GDI rendering. If not, probably I will have to use other browser, because this feature has been removed from the open-source Chromium code and soon or later it will affect all Chromium-based browsers.

If you were using the flag and now have fuzzy fonts, please try the following:1. Type ClearType in the Windows search box then click on "Adjust ClearType Text" in the search results. 2. Run the tuner, check the "Turn On ClearType" checkbox, then go through the rest of the screens of the wizard. 3. If after running the tuner text still looks fuzzy or blurry, try turning off anti-aliasing in Windows. This might be particularly helpful on very high resolution displays. To do so, you can use the following process: Open the control panel. Click "System and Security" then click "System". On the left side, click "Advanced system settings". Click the "Advanced" tab, then under "Performance" click the "Settings" button. Under the "Visual Effects" tab, uncheck the "Smooth edges of screen fonts" checkbox, click "Apply", and restart Chrome.

Mac OSX 10.11.6, Google Chrome is now unusably slow. Tabs take anything up to 10 minutes to load, switching between tabs will cause the app to freeze for anything up to a minute. Have tried countless reboots, PRAM clear, web cache clear, all with no change to app performance.

The font rendering from the changes in Chrome 52 on Mac OS are terrible and blurry as others have talked about. I have used it for less than 30 minutes and I had to walk away from my computer because of a headache. Chrome has been such a reliable browser for years, but this change is a massive step back. Unfortunately, I will need to switch browsers until a fix can be rolled out.

Wow! I'm running Mac OsX and all of a sudden my fonts in Chrome are HORRIBLE! They are extremely fuzzy and its really annoying. I am going to try the rollback after finding this thread since the latest update seems to be the reason. PLEASE fix this so that I don't have to switch browsers for good